May 13, 2007

Travels Along a Stream of Consciousness

“Plus ca change, plus c’est la meme chose”

Alphonse Karr, Les Guêpes, January 1849

May 13, 2007

Dear Friends,

The journey begins in Washington DC’s Dupont Circle, moves across the Atlantique to France, quickly back to the west coast of America, across the Pacific to the hamlets and jungles of Vietnam, west to the wastelands of Iraq, and finally back to Washington.

In elapsed time, just a few hours. But in history, several decades.

It started with an invitation to a Brookings Institution seminar on the French presidential elections – between the first and second rounds -- to hear some of the best French and U.S. scholars and journalists opine about the impending runoff election: who would win and by what margin; the mood of the French electorate; what a Sarkozy or Segolene Administration would mean to the French, to the relationship with the U.S., and to the future course and composition of the European Union.

At the same time, I was ruminating about David Halberstam’s senseless death in a car accident in a part of the country where I’d spent more than a decade, and in a place I knew well.

But Topic A was the French elections.

What factors generated the record turnout of French voters in the first round of the presidential race -- 85%, the highest since 1965?

Were the experts correct in their predictions -- that Sarkozy would prevail by a decisive margin over Segolene? that despite his campaign platform for change, not much would really change in France?

Is it just me or are the French confused?

On the one hand, Nicolas Sarkozy is proposing substantial change in the major elements of French public policy -- une "rupture " économique et sociale, une politique étrangère plus atlantiste, et une nouvelle culture de travail pour la France – as Brookings’ scholar and leading European political expert, Phillp Gordon, wrote recently in Le Figaro.

And on the other hand, the attraction of Segolene Royal is that she looks like change -- the first woman with a real shot at the Elysee, a beautiful new face among craggy predecessors, Parisian panache and Gallic sang-froid. But despite her talk of change, her Socialist DNA would practically assure the status quo.

“At 53, she's undeniably beautiful and comfortably chic, wearing bright colors (from Paule Ka for the most part) that leave her gray-suited rivals in the shade. As a campaigner her stamina is stunning. On a recent trip to Senegal, her press entourage marveled that even traveling through infernal heat Royal never broke a sweat. At a subliminal level, "Ségo" taps into the Gallic legends that made a girl in armor, Joan of Arc, the liberator of her country, and a mythical woman on the barricades, Marianne, the liberator of its people.” (Newsweek, 12/25/06)

So, I wondered -- “plus ca change, plus c’est la meme chose”?

While panelists debated the mindset of the French electorate – malaise? sinistrose? -- I drifted back to Halberstam, whose writing, nerve, and sense of story rank with the best of his craft. And whose observations about Vietnam and the men who led us into it – i.e., “the fog of war” -- were fuzzily in my head, hampered by the fog of age.

There was a mental and emotional tug-of-war brewing that morning

Topic A was the French elections, but Topic B – which might really be Topic A – was “plus ca change . . .”

I left Brookings, went home, got my Halberstams off the shelf and waded back through his many pages and my marginal notations, that spawned the early years of the 1970’s through the dawn of the 21st century.

“The Best and the Brightest” was chiefly on my mind, not because I thought it the best of his prodigious works, but because it seemed the most relevant to the present day.

And that set me to thinking about what phrase might best describe the men and women inside and outside this Administration who have given us Iraq, including those who have long since left the ranks protesting their innocence or offering proof of having been misunderstood – Perle and Tenet to name just two?

Certainly not “the best,” and probably not “the brightest.” Although not as profane or ill-tempered as General Tommy Franks’ characterization of Douglas Feith – Paul Wolfowitz’s acolyte at Defense.

The High and the Mighty? The Untouchables? The Proud and the Damned?

It doesn’t matter whether there is a one-phrase-fits-all, the grim reality is that the country is stuck with George Bush and Dick Cheney for another 20 months – two profoundly failed leaders who have lost the only tool available to governors in a democracy -- legitimacy.

And so to Halberstam’s “The Best and the Brightest,” for a fact-check on America’s own experience with “la plus ca change.”

“Lyndon Johnson had lost it all, and so had the rest of them; they had, for all their brilliance and hubris and sense of themselves, been unwilling to look and to and learn from the past and they had been swept forward by their belief in the importance of anti-Communism (and the dangers of not paying sufficient homage to it) and by the sense of power and glory, omnipotence and omniscience of America in this century."

Whew! -- they had, for all their brilliance and hubris and sense of themselves, been unwilling to look and to and learn from the past and they had been swept forward by their belief in the importance of . . .”

So much for Topic B -- “plus ca change.” Or in this case “plus ca change all over again.”

And that led me in the direction of Mark Twain’s notion that while history does not repeat itself, it often rhymes. And there is something of a rhyme scheme here.

Not between Topic A – the French elections – and Topic B – “plus ca change,” but between Topic B and Topic C – Iraq and Vietnam, The Fog of War, what happens when there are no acceptable alternatives left on the table, and when even the best efforts of good men and women to divine the truth come to naught.

And because one never knows where the stream of consciousness will lead and understands that any effort to influence its direction is sacrilege, here’s something I bumped into on the way down the river. It’s from Colonel Oliver North:

“Having now spent nearly as much time in Iraq as I did on my first ‘tour’ of Vietnam in 1968-69, it’s readily apparent that the parallels between the two wars are practically non-existent – on the battlefield. In the press and politics – it’s a different matter.”

North isn’t someone we need pay much attention to, thankfully, but on this point, he has it right: that while there are substantive tactical differences between these two cataclysmic failures in American diplomacy, foreign policy, and the management of war itself, they are alike in the ways that count most -- the press and politics -- meaning the way people come to understand them.

It’s the way people think about these two wars and the narrative that inevitably develops when an American adventure in “democracy promotion” goes awry, not for lack of military might but because there is something in us and in our leaders that cannot understand the things we are not and the way we are seen by those whose countries we invade even if with the best of intentions -- to free them from the yoke of oppression and sadistic leaders.

It’s as American as apple pie, or the 2nd Amendment.

And here again is Halberstam on that very point:

“Nor had they, leaders of a democracy, bothered to involve the people of their country in the course they had chosen: they knew the right path and they knew how much could be revealed, step by step along the way. They had manipulated the public, the Congress and the press from the start, told half truths, about why we were going in, how deeply we were going in, how much we were spending and how long we were in for. When their predictions turned out to be hopelessly inaccurate, and when the public and the Congress, annoyed at being manipulated, soured on the war, then the architects had been aggrieved. They had turned on those very symbols of the democratic society they had once manipulated, criticizing them for their lack of fiber, stamina and lack of belief. Why weren’t journalists more supportive? How could you make public policy with television cameras everywhere?

“So they lost it all. There was a sense of irony here, as if each player had lost, not just a major part of his personal reputation, but much of what he had truly believed in and wanted, much of what he had manipulated for in the first place."

Perhaps that will be the judgment of history about the Bush Administration and Iraq – that their rigid moral assurance coupled with their pliant amoral political tactics cascaded into a profoundly immoral undertaking that has undermined everything – everything -- it was designed to make right.

Almost everything they have done and said since the invasion of Afghanistan, the decimation of the Taliban, and the setting of sights on Saddam has created fissures and divisions, seemingly irreconcilable warring camps – first in America, then with the international community, and finally in Iraq. And this has left us with casualties everywhere and landscapes that will take years to revegetate.

But what’s past is past. Let it not be prologue.

All the king’s horses and all the king’s men cannot put Iraq back together again. Too much wrong has been done for too long, and too little right done by the ones who must live with the outcomes.

The Iraqis hate our being there, but don’t want us to leave just yet. Or rather, some do and some don’t.

We hate being there, but we’re not quite ready to leave just yet. Or rather some are and some aren’t.

Both they and we fear what Iraq and the Middle East will look like if we leave “prematurely” -- whatever that means after 50 months of carnage, more than $500 billion in treasure, and tens of thousands of Iraqi and U.S. lives lost or changed forever.

Come September, the surge will be as murky and tenebrous as it is today. The surge will not produce results that will allow generals, politicians, and pundits to make final judgments. And to think so is folly on a grand scale.

So while the tactical specifics and the probable aftermath of an American departure from Iraq may not be comparable to Vietnam – on that there is little disagreement – the imperative to follow the will of the electorate is – and on that there should be little disagreement.